A Peek Into The Statist Mind

Commuting into the office on the D.C. Metro this morning, I had to endure one of the common annoyances of public transportation: loud talkers, specifically two men who carried on a conversation during my entire ride, loudly enough for everyone around them to hear. In fact, they were loud enough that they were hard to ignore, much as I tried, while reading the paper.

Politically, they were both clearly on the left, which isn’t surprising in this town. But when they started rattling off the policy laundry list they’d like to see President Obama push in his second term, one of them seemed to forget he was in a public place. “There’s a lot you can do through executive orders,” he said, adding that Obama could “issue 100 of them; half of them will stick.”

That brutal honesty made them even harder to ignore. That Obama (like other recent presidents) would try to overreach his authority — and that his supporters would cheer him for doing so — isn’t surprising. But it’s not every day that you hear it expressed so bluntly.